I was just looking for a computer to run some large VMs and came up with a good deal on a Mac Pro, as long as you get your upgrades from somewhere other than Apple. I found a refurbished Mac Pro with dual quad-core 2.8GHz Xeons and 320GB drive for $2399 (a brand new one starts about $400 more). I then looked at www.a1acomputing.com (it was one of the first in my Google results), I found that they have a 16GB kit for 800MHz FB-DIMMs at $631.56 and 750GB drives for $174.89 each. If you add all that up (counting 3 of the drives), you get $3555.23 (if you started with a new one, the total would still be under $4000 at $3955.23). To get an idea of how great a deal that is, if you started with the same new Mac Pro and added the options at the price they're charging, the total would be ... $7199 (!!) - TWICE as much! And the savings are even more amazing if you were to go with 32GB of RAM. The smart route would total $5635.19 (or $6035.19 using a new Mac Pro), while the all-Apple route would total $12799.
There are lots of people out there who have no use for this much RAM, and I can appreciate that fact. So this post isn't for those people. I currently have two laptops (Macbook Pro and Thinkpad T61) each with 4GB of RAM, and my latest need is maxing both of them out, running just one VM each (each VM REQUIRES 3.2GB of RAM, as in the install of the software FAILS with anything less than this). Some of the software that I deal with just needs LOTS of RAM, and a system like the above would be worth the money for ME. But I'm just going to wait to see if I continue to need this much RAM before I actually pull the trigger.
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